By SUZANNE MUCHINIC special to the LOS ANGELES TIMESFrom Gray Glow to a Thunderbolt: Solo exhibitions approach extinction every summer in Los Angeles. Hot months are a good time to see a little art by a lot of people in group assemblies. To find a single artist’s work in quantity, you have to look harder or drive farther. Among the most notable solo shows at the moment is an exhibition of recent paintings by Marcia Roberts at Asher/Faure Gallery, 8221 Santa Monica Blvd. Roberts, a 36-year old resident of Venice, has never exhibited her paintings before. That fact is interesting because she has arrived with a startlingly mature group of canvases. At first they look like plain gray rectangles, but the longer you stare, the more compelling they are. It’s hard to focus on them because they exude an inner glow that seems to dissolve boundaries. Roberts has a strong allegiance to Southern California’s light/space artists, particularly Robert Irwin. Her paintings are made of dozens of layers of acrylic on canvas. Each has a frame of relatively glossy pigment painted around a matte interior. Each is divided—sometimes so subtly as to be nearly imperceptible—into horizontal bands. In the right light, the bands disappear and a luminous X-shape hovers in the center. The paintings exude a mysterious presence partly because they are not what they seem. Their grays are composed of many colors. Precise-looking bands are not of equal measurement. Perfection, it seems, is a matter of tempering intellect with intuition. Los Angeles Times /August 8, 1981 / Art Reviews

By DAVID PAGEL of the LOS ANGELES TIMESIntrusions: At Kiyo Higashi Gallery, seven new paintings by Marcia Roberts make light feel palpable-but only if a viewer slows down the whiplash pace at which one usually speeds through a dot.com-stimulated day of 24/7 access and impatient instantaneousness. If you’re in too big a rush, these quietly rapturous abstractions won’t get in your way. But if you give them a minute, they’ll repay your attentiveness handsomely, making each moment feel more expansive (and less jampacked) than before. Roberts’ predominantly gray canvases share more with sunsets than traditional monochromes. Loads of color-including delicate blues, light aquas, hazy yellows, wispy pinks and ethereal oranges-suffuse their seemingly plain surfaces, some with such subtlety that you experience them more like changes in temperature than shifts in tint.

Ranging in size from 2 to 7 feet on a side, each of Roberts’ works consists of an atmospheric field of modulated gray around whose edges she painted an asymmetrical border of duller, cooler gray. Within these unevenly angled frames appears a softly glowing X-shaped highlight-of the kind more often captured by cameras than seem with the naked eye, unless you’re squinting or crying. The contours of Roberts’ highlights are impossible to pinpoint. Sometimes resembling folds of cloth, ripples of water or bends in car fenders, they recall Billy Al Bengston’s underrated “Dentos” and Robert Irwin’s magisterial discs. Made of dozens of thin layers of acrylic, Roberts’ surfaces seem to record gradual accumulations of energy rather than to depict past events. They emphasize the present by changing significantly as you move around them and as sunlight moves through the room.

From three to 10 semi-translucent bars run horizontally across all but one of the paintings. Yanking the illusion of deep space back to the picture-plane, these intrusions unnecessarily restrict the expansiveness of Roberts’ art. As a group, her patiently made paintings demonstrate that gray is not a neutral tone that merely fills space between black and white but that it is a full-blown color, as indescribable and uncontrollable as any other. By triggering perceptions and stirring sentiments otherwise missed in the unthinking rush to get things done, Roberts’ abstractions transform fleeting moments into lasting, if intangible, treasures. Los Angeles Times /April 21, 2000 / Art Reviews

By MICHAEL DUNCAN of ART IN AMERICAA not widely known contemporary of Robert Irwin, James Turrell and Larry Bell, Marcia Roberts recently returned after a long hiatus with a stunning show of gently modulated, multilayered paintings. Refining her own niche as a Light and Space artist, she presented complex, extraordinarily subtle depictions of muted illumination. Like the best Minimalist works, her paintings possess a painstaking facture and structural rigor that invite slow, contemplative readings.

Featuring many flatly painted coats of variously toned acrylic, Roberts’s delicate grayish fields evoke shifts and gradations of dawn or evening light. In each of the paintings, a shimmering, off-center X shape uncannily emerges, resembling a large refraction of distant light. At certain angles the Xs are barley discernible, and upon close inspection they disappear into gently melded color. The gray fields are crossed with horizontal bars of a slightly deeper, complementary color. The depth of field created by these bars serves to make viewers feel they are on the inside, looking out into deep space. Like Venetian blinds, they partially block the light and create an air of privacy, mitigating the intensity of the color fields and setting them off as exterior theaters.

The glowing arenas are further demarcated by painted borders of more neutral blue-grays. Their slightly wobbly edges define the hand-drawn, personalized nature of Roberts’s enterprise. In Lenosa (2000), the subtly irregular, asymmetrical frame and the wavering of its nine horizontal bars evoke the sensitive line-making of Agnes Martin. The large, titled, X-shaped refraction in the rose-gray Alturas (2000) resembles a Robert Moskowitz windmill transmogrified into pure ether and light. The violet, icy-blue grays of Strathmore Aquarius #11 (2000) conjure the timeworn spaciness of a Symbolist landscape.

As with many of the works of James Turrell, Roberts’s new paintings induce a quiet yet dramatic sublimity. The ever-changing colors of twilight are emulated in the multihued aggregate of paint. These are complex grays, achieved through a blending of a wide variety of tones. Roberts’s process, her slow accrual of color, perfectly complements the temporal quality of natural light. This gorgeous, deeply felt work deserves greater exposure.Art in America/December 2000

By LEAH OLLMAN of the LOS ANGELES TIMES Sources of Light: Bordering each of Marcia Roberts' transfixing new paintings at Kiyo Higashi Gallery is a band of solid color that works like an internal, asymmetrical frame. It's fairly plain, and a bit too predictable in its slightly askew angles, but it serves perfectly as a foil for the spectacle within, as the mise-en-scene in support of the main event. Roberts' imageless images are stunning--but perhaps not immediately. They register at first as lovely, luminous color fields, each with a brighter spot near its center, darkening into another color toward the edges. In one, a pale white-gold gleams from within a field of green. In another, a misty pink light dissolves into darker surrounding turquoise. What makes these paintings come alive is a change in the light applied to them. Dim the gallery lights and suddenly that brighter spot at the canvas' center transforms into a light source itself, with uncanny physical presence. Built up from nearly 100 layers of paint, that gleam seems to emanate from deep within. It's a startling, magical feat, alchemical in its raising of a spirit from simple matter. The paintings that Roberts showed here last year, in shades of gray and taupe with horizontal stripes across them, are downright cerebral compared with these new, revelatory canvases. Roberts has emptied the frame of imagery but filled it with a richer experiential opportunity. What becomes necessary with these paintings, she writes in a statement, is time. Time and the changing conditions of light render these works animate. Like the Light and Space installations of James Turrell and Robert Irwin, Roberts' paintings are subtle, seductive marvels that evolve as we awaken. Los Angeles Times / November 16, 2001 / Art Reviews

By ROBERTA CARRASSO of ARTSCENEIt’s so nice to encounter art that draws the viewer into its bosom. Marcia Roberts’ compelling Light and Space canvasses, devoid of all cerebral elements that make the viewer wrestle—subject matter, history—is pure color, light and space that form breathtaking visual meditation that just stops you in your tracks. Five large and majestic paintings, rendered meticulously with a minimum of one hundred layers each of analogous color in which, using conventional materials, Roberts achieves light emitting effects similar to those requiring technology. The finished works are composed of a strong colored background, a shimmering lipstick pink/orange, vivid lavender, or earthy green, along with a trapezoidal, off centered foreground of subtly varied hue: a faintly different pink, a blue/lavender, or another green. Look closely, you’ll see that Roberts plays with edge. Now it’s here, then it disappears, as if through the masterful use of color manipulation, matte and glossy paint overlays, the image moves before our eyes. Moreover, the angularity and closeness of the color palette creates a primordial atmosphere, as if the forming universe has reached a state of perfection. Art Scene / April 2003

By MARLENA DONOHUE of ARTSCENEAfter early Light/Space experiments, Marcia Roberts turned her attention not to actual illumination, but to the stunningly subtle painted manipulation of that property which both physics and art agree is interchangeable with light: color. To deal with the phenomenological and emotive aspects of light-as-color/color-as-light in non-literal ways, to ask these questions within the hugely loaded baggage of the abstract canvas, and to do this with inventive rigor is extraordinary. Roberts’ work invokes Kasmir Malevich, Minimalism, color-field and Agnes Martin; all are helpful to give a general sense of what Roberts does so well. But the truth is that this “light business” and Roberts’ astute understanding of it pulls in a much older dialogue and inquiry into what might be called the essential components of human sensed experience (and therefore necessarily of art experience): time, light and color. Such reflections wash over you as you stand gawking at the virtuoso mechanics of these works. Usually the conditions of real light interacting with a sentient changing perceiver create these effects, but Roberts produces them without a light source, just her astoundingly deft manipulation of hued pigment. You swear a gallery light is creating an ever so controlled shaft of light strafing from lower right to upper left; however, when you move to take in the next work and the errant, sonorous light that makes these canvases bend and expand, contract and oscillate is in a completely different orientation, you want to have the lights off so you can check your experience against the physical condition in the room. What you are left with if you look and listen: questions about how we order the world through our senses; how we know what we know. . .this is not lightweight stuff. Roberts’ abstract fields of color and edge involve hundreds of layers of pigment. The eventual color we read--often a smoky gray-beige, almost a pearly evanescent field--is comprised of calibrations the precision and patience of which are either Zen or surgical, and either way a marvel. Roberts uses colored surface to create in one section a deep and infinite expanse; as the eye tracks just inches to the left, your senses collide with a space flatter than the modernist grid. Then you track a bit further and encounter yet another surface that suggests something totally alien, like aluminum or fiberglass rising to a sensual curve that moves away like a car fender, absolutely subverting any rational depth cues we’d expect from either day to day perception or traditional abstract art. This is done so deftly that you never notice the breaks in the compositional gestalt. Her technique is to make a background or border of a unified color (itself comprised of hundreds of layers of diverse pigment), then to float a tilted trapezoidal ghost of a shape in that field whose “corners” never quite materialize but only suggest themselves into and out of space to create this plastic fluidity. She runs endless trials on paper until she achieves what to a viewer looks effortless and serene. Roberts manipulates acrylic paint such that in spots it appears matte, in others glossy. The border's color is a constant in each work, but the subtle control of what hue and light reside next to it make it appear to change drastically; and those perception-bending contrasts have been turned up more than a notch in current works. (This may dismay those who loved the contemplative tenor of previous works.) So, this artist can paint. But what does this mean in 2006? Since the ‘60s, with the mobilization of real and cyberspace, real and cyber time, real and cyber materials, real and cyber life, the pursuit of painting has been a contested arena of art production. And if painting is suspect, abstract painting is so to the second power. The post-modern era has in part been characterized by a kind of allergic reaction to abstract painting because what began in earlier modernism as a universalist intent, a visual language for everyone, ended up as slick and privileged collectibles. Looking beyond the mastery of Roberts’ formalist approach, consider the meaning of abstract painting she conveys at a time when many accept that to interrogate our slippery, semiotic world, painterly abstraction seems not to be the best vehicle. But with insouciant painterly grace these works offer a compelling retort. They stimulate contemplation of essential things: how do we experience, what do we see, how do we make sense of this sea of multifarious perceptions. Beyond that, they remind us that you cannot extricate meaning from form, and Roberts gives us form that reminds us that perception itself is varied. Art Scene / April 2003

By ROBERTA CARRASSO of LAGUNA NEWS-POSTMarcia Roberts’ paintings, exhibited at the Peter Blake Gallery, express far more than can be observed at the initial viewing. They convey profound spiritual ideas, taking painting to a transcendent level where the art propels viewers to pause, even deeply contemplate the abstract image before them.

The most noticeable feature of Roberts’ paintings is color and surface. Associated with the eminent Los Angeles Light and Space movement, Roberts’ labor intensively coats her canvas with about 60 layers of analogous color, the inner portion with glossy acrylic paint, but the edge with a matte surface. At some point, having built a dynamic skin - of blues and lavenders or oranges and lipstick pinks – the canvas awakens, shimmering with life as it emits light and a sense of dimensionality that transcends the flatness of its construction. Roberts plots out her work, determining beforehand the colors she will use and the effect she wishes to achieve. For her, paint is light. When she began as a Light and Space artist, she experimented, as did other artist in the movement, with physical light using various devices. For example, she would paint on slides and project them onto shaped canvas. Over the years, this became unnecessary as Roberts now attains the richness of surface and light without technology. Observing the individual painting, the eye becomes enlivened by tonality, the subtle use of shape and edge that emerge from the luminosity each canvas emits. Consequently, Roberts’ art is held in high esteem, exhibited in the finest galleries and sought by distinguished collectors. Roberts pares down her work, seeking to explore only the essential nature of art. For Roberts, it is pure color. She deals with the power of surface, and eliminates the analytic and cerebral. Subject, material, history and psychological angst are discarded. Consequently, the viewer does not try nor need to figure out the art, but rather willingly succumbs to its spell, delighting in the joy of engagement in a completely beautiful aesthetic. Laguna News-Post / Nov. 20, 2003 / Art Waves

By CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT of the LOS ANGELES TIMES Twelve recent paintings by Marcia Roberts submit one compositional format to different color combinations. A familiar aesthetic of light and space is given a refreshing, sensual spin. Roberts’ paintings at Rosamund Felsen Gallery use the external shape of the canvas as the source for their internal image. A rectangular plane appears to tilt back on the diagonal, floating within a space of atmospheric color. On an opposite diagonal, a glow of light creates an almost metallic sheen across the surface. Where the color in the floating plane is dark, the surrounding atmosphere is light - and vice versa. Space flips and flops, expands and contracts, and the color assumes a remarkable luminosity. One of the nicest touches in this work is tucked around the corner. Roberts paints the sides of the unframed stretcher in what appears to be the same basic hue as the internal floating plane. This contrasting color anchors the material object suspended on the wall, just as it tethers the illusionistic object pictured within the painting. The device is emblematic of the holistic thoroughness and care she puts into these lovely works. Los Angeles Times / February 4, 2006 / Art Reviews

By DANIELLA WALSH of the ORANGE COUNTY REGISTERShades of Gray: A year ago, the Peter Blake Gallery exhibited paintings that spotlighted the surprisingly rich and numerous gradations of white. Exploring levels of illumination, idiosyncrasies of paints, layering and creation of texture, a group of artists including Jimi Gleason, James Hayward and Connie Goldman, among others, produced a wide array of canvasses for the show titled "Winter White." A runaway success both critically and commercially, its sequel was to have been a collection of all black canvasses, reminiscent perhaps of the minimalist masterpieces of Ad Reinhardt. But, just as gallery owner Peter Blake's entourage started to hum "paint it black," he determined that four gallery rooms filled with black canvasses might be just too over the top. Instead, he gave a select group of his abstract/minimalist artists a different challenge: He asked them to eliminate color from their most recent work, save for hues of black, white and gray. Other than that, they were free to interpret the directive in whatever manner they chose. The result is an intriguing exhibition that, at its recent First Thursday Art Walk opening, drew an appreciative audience. Indeed, its overall effect is far more witty and diverse than one might have expected – think of painters gone wild with Ansel Adams' Zone System. Grand master of minimalism Tony DeLap crafted "Card Sharp," an asymmetrical creation. As is typical of DeLap's work, this composition is based on the interplay of light and shadow. The canvas' warm black hue thus plays to the darker shadow it casts on the wall while incoming sunlight transposes a stark reflection of the gallery's window framework onto the matte surface. Since DeLap has not significantly changed his basic concepts over the years, his works remain as classic and intriguing as a silent movie. This absence of color plays particularly well to the elegant lines inherent in Alex Couwenberg's paintings. By layering collage elements and painted abstract forms that he strikingly outlines in black or white, he has created works superior to his usually more colorful oeuvre. Elegant and at least superficially engaging, his previous, more vividly rendered pieces were nonetheless in danger of becoming too decorative and repetitious. This new series illustrates his mastery of monochromatic gradations and impeccable craftsmanship ("Quicksilver 19 and 21"). Comparisons to modernist abstract photography easily come to mind. Even though there is a repetitive element in Gleason's body of work as well, it still contains enough mystery and room for interpretation to stave off boredom indefinitely. His luminous, subtly hued paintings owe their impact to careful planning on one hand and skill in turning surprise elements inherent in the application of countless layers of paint to his advantage on the other. Thus, I approached the prospect of seeing a gray Gleason with some trepidation. There was no need to worry. "Outcast," with its deceptively random patterns, reminds one of water flowing over a dimly lit stretch of sand, while "El Moro" and "Jage Mirage" provide the usual Gleason magic – in permutation of a pale, somewhat gold-cast white this time. Still, this time Marcia Roberts steals the show. Her gray-on-gray abstract forms, reminiscent of delicate folded, luminescent sheets of paper, hold sway over what is generally first-rate fare. "Pacifica," "Valemar" and "Montara" evidence not only superior sense of design but superb mastery of medium. By contrast, Daniel Mendel-Black's loosely brushed and impastoed compositions appear a bit haphazard in this (technically) fine-tuned environment. I suppose one also becomes spoiled after looking at Greg Renfrow's Light and Space-informed acrylic panels, which, through his deft use of line and light, appear as physically temporal and mysterious as a (photographic) negative. But then, there is another surprise, namely work by Lita Albuquerque, who obliged Blake by really painting it black. Normally, she produces countless gold leaf-covered, concave and other circular forms surrounded by fields of matte blue, a color known by now as "Lita blue." This time, the familiar spheres are silver, embedded into a velvety black background, or vice versa – black circles surrounded by delicate silver leaf. The results are stunning and, consequently, some of the blue/gold (with occasional touches of red) works in Blake's back room look like yesterday's news. Ironically, this very contemporary lineup touches on a bit of art history. After all, roughly a century and a half ago, when photography first made its inroads, painters hoped, in vain, that it would be a passing fad. Now, the erstwhile upstart appears to have become inspiration. Orange County Register / January 14, 2007

By A. MORET of ARTSCENE - http://byamoret.comThe complex and astutely scientific studies of light in Marcia Roberts’ solo show at Rosamund Felsen Gallery are simply mesmerizing. Roberts captures sheets of light floating on the pictorial plane, suspended in time and space as they lean and fold in on each other. Presenting the same subject in each canvas, Roberts’ roots in the Light and Space Movement are evident in the subtle gradations of color illuminating the paintings from a distance. Varying numbers of light sheets are presented in each canvas but they all appear like a stack of dominoes looming over a Faberge egg. “Gold Note Ridge” depicts six sheets with clay colored lines criss-crossing over them, and connecting (and thereby inventing) an imagined space. The work is at once a collision of space but the light is barely touching and leaning simultaneously. Art Scene/ January 2010

By MICHAEL DUNCAN of ART IN AMERICAPasadena artist Helen Pashgian, a vastly under-recognized member of the Light and Space movement of the 1960s, has long fashioned industrial materials into sleek transmitters of the ineffable. Earlier this year, two of her small acrylic sculptures were included in the exhibition “Primary Atmospheres: Works from California 1960-1970”, at David Zwirner, New York, alongside works by James Turrell, Larry Bell and Robert Irwin. Her recent Pomona exhibition featured six new sculptures (ranging from 2007 to 2009) that mark a high point in her career to date. The untitled sculptures are free-standing, 7½-foot-tall, translucent columns formed from molded sheets of monochrome, matte-toned acrylic. Pashgian assembled the works into a kind of temple of oddly shaped monoliths, each a carved realm of deep-seeming moody space. The individual sculptures consist of two side-by-side vertical tubes whose con-joined tops resemble the symbol for infinity. Within each column, acting as horizontal braces, are rods of copper or acrylic. Light striking the square or round rods from overhead generates a variety of mysterious effects. For example, on one side of a deep blue-gray column appears a shimmering red-orange line that evokes a sunset horizon, while another section of the work seems to give off fiery sparks. The end of one small round acrylic rod deep within a dark green column looks like a comet trailing an angular expanse of light. The surface of a square rod within a gray column creates a shimmering window of light, like a miniature Turrell installation. These diaphanous effects subtly animated the large, dimly lit gallery. Pashgian’s ethereal sensibility parallels that of abstract painters Mary Corse and Marcia Roberts, two other L.A. artists who more thanhold their own in a largely male club of CaliforniaLight and Space. Art in America / September 2010

Artweek.LA - http://www.artweek.laAn exhibition of thirteen new paintings and a selection of small drawings. Runs through April 14 at Rosamund Felsen Gallery.Marcia Roberts has for many years been dedicated to a careful exploration of the phenomena of light. An early practitioner of the principles of California’s Light & Space ethos, Roberts has eschewed the customarily synthetic, modern materials and dimensional installations common to the movement and instead uses some of the oldest and most traditional art-making instruments available: paint and canvas. This gesture away from new, fabricated materials deemphasizes the sensuousness of modern industrial enterprise and signals instead an emphasis on the perceptual effects of light as mixed with pigment, and contained within a painting.

The effect is a series of paintings that are illusory and hypnotic. Roberts’ latest works range from very pale to almost black; they all depict faintly receding planes that look to our eye to be translucent, and from under which there appears to be a murmur of glowing light. Here artificial light, natural light, and the expertly rendered gradations of light in paint intermingle, causing an almost magic-like illusion of perceptual misdirection. Artweek.LA/ March 26, 2012 Issue

By Trevor Spaulding of Painting in L.A. -http://www.paintinginla.com/2013/05/marcia-roberts-at-rosamund-felsen.htmlThe exhibition of paintings by Marcia Roberts is on view at Rosamund Felsen Gallery through June 1, 2013.I ran across this sweet little exhibition of paintings by California-based artist Marcia Roberts Saturday night at Rosamund Felsen Galleryin Santa Monica. Two shows were opening simultaneously at the gallery that night - the other being a sculpture exhibition by artist Mindy Alper - and a sizable crowd of patrons had turned out in support. The gallery was abuzz with chatter and movement, except in the room where Roberts' work hung where an atmosphere of quiet austerity prevailed. People seemed to feel the need to slow down and hush up around her paintings, as if paying their respects.

The paintings in this show stick to a 'pattern and deviation' formula often found in poetry. When a pattern exists, any deviation from it tends to stick out like a sore thumb and that is often where the action is. Here, Roberts presents a group of paintings that all look pretty much the same - an irregular quadrilateral sits atop a rectangle, bordered by the edges of the canvas. They only differ in color-scheme and in the play of light present at the center of each. So, without even reading the press release, you'd be safe to assume that color and light must be what Roberts finds important.

I enjoy geometric abstraction in which the artist's hand is quietly present (which reminds me of this fascinating article by James Elkins about Mondrian's technique) and Roberts' work fits that category. From a distance, her lines may look flawlessly straight, but on closer inspection it becomes clear that they are hand-painted and just irregular enough to be interesting, without being distracting. The actual surfaces of the paintings are dull and flat, but Roberts employs exquisitely subtle shifts in color to create the illusion of light glowing softly from within the geometric forms. Think Rothko by way of Malevich. Painting in L.A./ May 6, 2013